Voter Suppression, Then and Now

The United States, founded on the democratic principle of free and fair elections, has a longstanding history of voter suppression. Though one may assume that the days of Jim Crow are gone, a number of regulations currently before courts and lawmakers are once again threatening to make it more difficult for certain segments of the population to vote.

When the Fourteenth Amendment passed, granting citizenship to former slaves, states still took covert and explicit steps to ensure that non-whites could not vote. Blacks attempting to vote would be asked to pay poll taxes, take exceptionally difficult literacy tests, and fulfill requirements of the Grandfather Clause to be eligible to vote, all of which were specifically designed to disallow blacks from voting.

Though states no longer require literacy tests to be eligible to vote, regulations that seem eerily similar to those of the 19th and 20th centuries are resurfacing in states all across the country.

Over the summer, the Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s system for removing voters from the registry for failing to vote. If an Ohio citizen fails to vote over a certain period of time, he or she will be automatically removed from the state’s voter registry and will have to re-register in order to vote again.

Georgia Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp (Image)

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a regulation that will disenfranchise Native Americans living in North Dakota. The regulation requires that voters provide proof of their physical address in order to be able to vote. While this regulation may seem mundane, it has serious consequences for the state’s Native American population, many of which use a P.O. box to receive mail because the postal service does not deliver to the remote areas that they occupy. Thus, citizens using a P.O. box to receive mail may not have a utility bill or a driver’s license with a physical address, which would prevent them from voting.

Regardless of the motivations behind voter restrictions, such patterns are not new; they date back to the early days of the United States’ founding and have been questioned as to their place in a democracy time and time again.